Trash Mountain

Trash Mountain
Author: Jane Yolen
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books ®
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1467776858

This you should know: Gray squirrels are almost always larger, faster, and more aggressive than reds. They out-eat the reds and out-breed them. Science says the grays will eventually win. Nutley is a young red squirrel. For most of his life, he's been content to live on local seeds and the cautious wisdom of his parents. But like so many young squirrels before him, he feels the call of the wild (and the hazelnuts) beyond the safety of his family's own tree. Nutley wonders what it would be like to be Dangerous, like the growing band of gray squirrels that roam his neighborhood. Nature, which is truly red in tooth and claw, forces Nutley to find out if he's cut out for a life of danger. He must flee his familiar tree for the smelly shelter of the local landfill. There, with the help of some unlikely allies, he might just be able to make a stand against the grays. This you should know: No matter what scientists say is almost always true, the exceptions are almost always the best stories.

Trash Mountain

Trash Mountain
Author: Bradley Bazzle
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1597096237

A young man goes to war against a landfill in a novel that “revels in the absurd but never strays far from the deeply felt humanity of its characters” (Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza). Ben Shippers doesn’t have much use for school, friends, or pretty much anyone except his smartass sister, but he does harbor a secret passion: Trash Mountain, the central feature of the noxious landfill next to his house, the fumes from which have made his sister ill. After a botched attempt to destroy Trash Mountain with a homemade firebomb, Ben begins a years-long infiltration operation that leads him to drop out of school to work alongside homeless trash-pickers, and then, eventually, intern at the very place he meant to destroy. Ben’s boss there, a charismatic would-be titan of sanitation, shows Ben the intricate moralities of the trash industry, forcing him to choose between monetary stability and his environmental principles. With dark humor, Trash Mountain reflects on life in small southern cities in decline—and an adolescent’s search for fundamental values without responsible adults to lead the way. “From Mark Twain to George Saunders . . . Trash Mountain joins a long tradition of dark humor, wild inventiveness, and social satire in American letters. By turns hilarious, colorful, and strange.” —Maceo Montoya, author of The Deportation of Wopper Barraza “Chronicles the ways in which Ben’s early idealism erodes under more complex concerns . . . Bazzle’s novel explores the compromises one makes in life even as it blends the gritty and the extravagant along the way.” —Kirkus Reviews

Trash Mountain

Trash Mountain
Author: Jane Yolen
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1467771708

Nutley is a young red squirrel who finds himself alone after his parents are killed. He flees his familiar tree for the shelter of the local landfill, where he must take on the powerful grays.

Castaway Mountain

Castaway Mountain
Author: Saumya Roy
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 166260095X

*One of NPR's "Books We Love 2021"* "'I came to see the mountains as an outpouring of our modern lives,' Roy writes, 'of the endless chase for our desires to fill us.' Readers of Behind the Beautiful Forevers will be drawn to this harrowing portrait." —Publishers Weekly "Castaway Mountain deserves every accolade. A stunning achievement." —Kiran Desai, Booker Prize Winner, author of Inheritance of Loss. All of Mumbai’s possessions and memories come to die at the Deonar garbage mountains. Towering at the outskirts of the city, the mountains are covered in a faint smog from trash fires. Over time, as wealth brought Bollywood knock offs, fast food and plastics to Mumbaikars, a small, forgotten community of migrants and rag-pickers came to live at the mountains’ edge, making a living by re-using, recycling and re-selling. Among them is Farzana Ali Shaikh, a tall, adventurous girl who soon becomes one of the best pickers in her community. Over time, her family starts to fret about Farzana’s obsessive relationship to the garbage. Like so many in her community, Farzana, made increasingly sick by the trash mountains, is caught up in the thrill of discovery—because among the broken glass, crushed cans, or even the occasional dead baby, there’s a lingering chance that she will find a treasure to lift her family’s fortunes. As Farzana enters adulthood, her way of life becomes more precarious. Mumbai is pitched as a modern city, emblematic of the future of India, forcing officials to reckon with closing the dumping grounds, which would leave the waste pickers more vulnerable than ever. In a narrative instilled with superstition and magical realism, Saumya Roy crafts a modern parable exploring the consequences of urban overconsumption. A moving testament to the impact of fickle desires, Castaway Mountain reveals that when you own nothing, you know where true value lies: in family, community and love. Interior map illustration copyright (c) Jake Coolidge

Trash Fish

Trash Fish
Author: Greg Keeler
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2008-09-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1582439192

Trash Fish is the story of a boy who gives himself over to his obsession with fish as an escape from the trials of growing up. Time and again, as his life unfolds to reveal his failings and foibles to those around him, he returns to the fish, which cast him a lifeline of their own. Laugh–out–loud funny yet sardonically raw to the bone, Keeler tells a whole whirlpool of a story—the women, the Peace Corps, the teaching jobs, the marriage and children, and, of course, the rod and reel. Eventually, however, his serene fishing life becomes contaminated with real–world influences: a polite society of angling purists insists that he choose between flies and bait, while his alter ego (and nemesis) begins to use fishing as an excuse to cheat on his wife. Ultimately, Keeler's fisherman must acknowledge that he can't escape down the river bend, and that in order to experience true love, he must accept the complexities within himself and within the people on land around him.

Mountain Tales

Mountain Tales
Author: Saumya Roy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Marginality, Social
ISBN: 9781788165372

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Newbery Honor Book)

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (Newbery Honor Book)
Author: Grace Lin
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0316052604

A Time Magazine 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time selection!​ A Reader’s Digest Best Children’s Book of All Time​! This stunning fantasy inspired by Chinese folklore is a companion novel to Starry River of the Sky and the New York Times bestselling and National Book Award finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver In the valley of Fruitless mountain, a young girl named Minli lives in a ramshackle hut with her parents. In the evenings, her father regales her with old folktales of the Jade Dragon and the Old Man on the Moon, who knows the answers to all of life's questions. Inspired by these stories, Minli sets off on an extraordinary journey to find the Old Man on the Moon to ask him how she can change her family's fortune. She encounters an assorted cast of characters and magical creatures along the way, including a dragon who accompanies her on her quest for the ultimate answer. Grace Lin, author of the beloved Year of the Dog and Year of the Rat returns with a wondrous story of adventure, faith, and friendship. A fantasy crossed with Chinese folklore, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is a timeless story reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Her beautiful illustrations, printed in full-color, accompany the text throughout. Once again, she has created a charming, engaging book for young readers.

Garbage Land

Garbage Land
Author: Elizabeth Royte
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2007-10-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0316030732

Out of sight, out of mind ... Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels.... But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away? In Garbage Land, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can. Along the way, we meet an odor chemist who explains why trash smells so bad; garbage fairies and recycling gurus; neighbors of massive waste dumps; CEOs making fortunes by encouraging waste or encouraging recycling-often both at the same time; scientists trying to revive our most polluted places; fertilizer fanatics and adventurers who kayak amid sewage; paper people, steel people, aluminum people, plastic people, and even a guy who swears by recycling human waste. With a wink and a nod and a tightly clasped nose, Royte takes us on a bizarre cultural tour through slime, stench, and heat-in other words, through the back end of our ever-more supersized lifestyles. By showing us what happens to the things we've "disposed of," Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume. Radiantly written and boldly reported, Garbage Land is a brilliant exploration into the soiled heart of the American trash can.

In the Shadow of Denali

In the Shadow of Denali
Author: Jonathan Waterman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2009-12-08
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1461745780

A classic in the genre of mountain literature—with a new preface by the author Rising more than 20,000 feet into the Alaskan sky is Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. In this collection of exhilarating and stunning narratives, Jonathan Waterman paints a startlingly intimate portrait of the white leviathan and brings to vivid life men and women whose fates have entwined on its sheer icy peak.

Trash Trucks!

Trash Trucks!
Author: Daniel Kirk
Publisher: Putnam Juvenile
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997
Genre: Refuse and refuse disposal
ISBN: 9780399229275

Trash trucks roam the city streets gobbling up all the garbage.